US National Gallery of Art acquires major work by overlooked Native American Abstract Expressionist
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Loading... - Vincent Xavier
- 24 Feb 2023
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The untitled 1961 painting, by Chippewa artist George Morrison, is the first by a Native American member of the New York School movement in the NGA’s collection
George Morrison (1919-2000), a member of the Grand Portage Band of Chippewa, was a key member of the Abstract Expressionist cohort in New York City in 1940s, 50s and 60s, but his contributions have long been omitted from the movement’s history. Now, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC has helped ensure his representation with the acquisition of his vibrant painting, Untitled (1961), the first piece by a Native American artist added to its important collection of New York School works.
The composition’s vivid and thickly impastoed areas of red, purple, pink, ochre, blue and green, which Morrison rendered by squeezing paint from tubes directly onto the canvas, are in dialogue with contemporaneous works by Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston and other AbEx artists, but also reflect an Indigenous relationship to the landscape. The composition’s tripartite organisation, an NGA press release notes, evokes the elements of sky, land and water in Anishinaabe cosmology. Read More..
